You’re out with your friends at your favorite restaurant or spending time with your friends and family over a weekend and you start visiting with someone you haven’t met before. In the background, the music is seemingly ever present and the conversations around you are interfering with their voice.

The story begins and then OH NO! The context of what they are talking about is coming out of left field. You try to fill in the blanks but you feel like you’re completely lost. You kind of smile and nod once in a while. You keep trying to catch a key phrase that will enable you to understand enough to fill in the blanks. But by now, you’re in an emotional panic and you will do anything but ask them to repeat the beginning because you now realize that all seems to be lost.

So you nod and smile again and try to move on quickly. Maybe you hope someone comes up and they repeat the story so you have a second chance to hear it. Or you make some brilliant statement like “that must have been a very interesting experience and I hope to hear more about it later. That IS the truth because you might give anything to really HEAR what they are talking about.

But before you can get away, disaster strikes!

You see a social cliff ahead. They ask a question and you answer with a timid “yes”. Suddenly, they look confused. Darn! It wasn’t a yes or no question!

You play down the incident with a shrug, blaming the noise and putting the ball back in her court. But, you can’t hide the embarrassment.

Why we pretend to hear

It depends. Some of us don’t want to interrupt the flow of the conversation or don’t want to do anything that calls attention to our hearing problem. Or maybe we just don’t know how else to deal with the situation. Especially in group conversations, we don’t want to be a burden and ask everyone to repeat everything just so that we can be filled in—multiple times.

The thing is, everyone pretends. Pretending occasionally is probably harmless, but when you have hearing loss and you pretend, you give the false impression to others that you can hear better than you do. Pretending can sometimes get you out of an uneasy situation temporarily, but as my dad used to say, “That’s no way to run a railroad!” Deep down you know it’s no way to live.

One way to relieve this stress is to try to resolve the problem. Go see an audiologist and let them help you determine if there is a possible solution for your situation. The technology available today is far superior to that of even 3 or 4 years ago. So even if you explored it before, it might be time to try again!

Audio Acoustics, a full-ser­vice hearing center owned by Orland Purcell, Au. D., has been in business since 1975. Ginger Peugh, Au. D., is his associate. They offer industrial hearing conservation, diagnostic audiology and a wide variety of hearing aids. They are located at 2101 North Midland Drive, Suite Four. The phone number is 689-4327.